When Anna Olivia Healey died of cancer at nine years old, her grieving parents vowed to honor their daughter’s memory and help find a way to beat the cruel disease.
Now, more than 20 years later, Steven and Barbara Healey’s goal of sparing thousands of other families from the same heartbreak looks within reach.
Scientists on Tuesday unveiled results of a ‘cancer-killing pill’ — named in honor of the little girl from Indiana — which appears to ‘annihilate’ all types of solid tumors tested in a lab.
AOH1996, coined using Anna’s initials and year of birth, seemingly left healthy cells unharmed, too.
And while its not yet proven to work in humans, researchers from one of the leading cancer treatment and research hospitals, City of Hope in California, are very much encouraged by the preliminary findings.
AOH1996 is named after Anna Olivia Healey, who died in 2005 from neuroblastoma, a deadly childhood cancer
Born in Indiana in 1996, Anna — who was described as ‘loving life’ and who ‘lived each day with an inspiring positive attitude’ by her parents — lived with neuroblastoma for five years
Since its founding in 2002, the A.N.N.A. Fund — established by Anna’s parents — has raised more than $500,000 for neuroblastoma research and families with neuroblastoma
Dr Linda Malkas, who works in the department of molecular diagnostics and experimental therapeutics at City of Hope, pledged to do everything she could to tackle the disease after meeting Mr Healey just months before Anna died from neuroblastoma in 2005. She said the results were ‘promising’.
AOH1996, a type of targeted chemotherapy, hones in on a protein present in dozens of cancers that cause tumors to grow and multiply.
Until now, the protein — proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) — was thought to be ‘undruggable’.
Explaining how the drug works, Dr Malkas said: ‘PCNA is like a major airline terminal hub containing multiple plane gates.
‘Data suggests PCNA is uniquely altered in cancer cells.
‘This fact allowed us to design a drug that targeted only the form of PCNA in cancer cells.’
She added: ‘Our cancer-killing pill is like a snowstorm which closes a key airline hub, shutting down all flights in and out only in planes carrying cancer cells.’
AOH1996, yet to be officially named, was tested on 70 different cancer cells in a lab — including breast, prostate, ovarian, and lung cancer.
Results shared in the journal Cell Chemical Biology showed the drug worked against them all.
In 2002, the A.N.N.A. Fund was established by Anna’s parents and has raised more than $500,000 for neuroblastoma research and families with neuroblastoma.
Born in Zionsville, Indiana in 1996, Anna — who ‘lived each day with an inspiring positive attitude’ — battled neuroblastoma for five years.
Her brother Brian was just six when she passed away shortly before her 10th birthday in 2006.
At the time, Dr Malkas worked as an oncologist at Indiana University School of Medicine.
Her initial research focused on breast cancer, studying a protein found in cancer cells but not normal cells.
Anna (pictured above with her father and brother) battled neuroblastoma, a children’s cancer that affects only 600 kids in America per year, for five years. Her brother Brian was just six yeas old when she passed away
Mr Healey, a photographer, met Dr Malkas when he was asked to take photographs of her for a newspaper article. He told Dr Malkas about his daughter battling the deadly disease
However, after meeting Mr Healey, a photographer who had been asked to take photographs of Dr Malkas for a newspaper article, she was inspired to switch her focus, and her research into neuroblastoma began.
Speaking about her work last year, Dr Malkas said: ‘She died when she was only nine years old from neuroblastoma, a children’s cancer that affects only 600 kids in America each year.
‘I met Anna’s father when she was at her end stages.
‘I sat him down for two hours in my office and showed him all of my data on this protein I had been studying in cancer cells.’
There he told Dr Malkas that his daughter was at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. At eight years old, Anna had been living with neuroblastoma for nearly half of her life.
Neuroblastoma accounts for only eight percent of all cancers, but is responsible for 15 percent of all cancer-related deaths.
Months later, Anna’s parents revisited the lab to see the work Dr Malkas was doing firsthand.
‘[Steve] asked if I could do something about neuroblastoma and he wrote my lab a check for $25,000’, Dr Malkas said.
‘He said, “Dr. Malkas, we know you do all this great work on breast cancer, but if you could do something for neuroblastoma, it would mean the world to Barbara and me”‘, she said.
‘This set the whole thing in motion’.
Dr Malkas added: ‘That was the moment that changed my life — my fork in the road. I knew I wanted to do something special for that little girl’.
Untreated cancer cells are seen on the left and cancer cells treated with AOH1996 undergoing programmed cell death (in violet) are pictured on the right. AOH1996 targets a cancerous variant of the protein PCNA. In its mutated form, PCNA is critical in DNA replication and repair of all expanding tumors
Dr Malkas spoke with several laboratories, but none could commit the necessary time and resources.
Then she received a phone call from City of Hope in California asking to meet and discuss the possibility of bringing her research to the institution.
When Dr Malkas began her work at the hospital in 2011, she did so with a mandate: to develop a molecule that would shut down the same protein she had helped identify, PCNA, which, in its mutated form, is ‘critical’ in the replication of DNA and the repair of all ‘expanding tumors’.
The results noted that AOH1996 selectively killed cancer cells by ‘disrupting the normal cell reproductive cycle’ and seemingly left healthy cells untouched.
As a next step, researchers will seek to understand the mechanism of action better to further improve the ongoing clinical trial in humans. A phase one study is already underway.